Chapter 2 “Without Declaring War” from Oleg Anisimov’s book “FIASCO: How I Invested Millions in a Startup and Lost Them” (2025). The full book in Russian.
On June 22, 2017, I got an email.
It was from Timur Abdrakhmanov — the same guy in the green blazer from the renovation service Kvadrim. He’d seen my post about looking for startups to invest in.
“I thought you might be interested in seeing our pitch materials,” Timur buzzed electronically, “since we’re currently fundraising for my new interior design service Tim&Team, based on the expertise of the Studio 3.14 crew — which, I hope, you’ve had a positive experience working with.”
Well, yeah. Back in fall 2016, I’d contacted him to design a two-room, 45-square-meter apartment in Moscow. The building was set to be delivered closer to 2018. I wanted to start renovations early — maybe rent it out, or use it for family.
Designer Marina Kozlyakova from Studio 3.14 took on the job. She managed to reconcile my contradictory wishes and came up with a beautiful design, waiting patiently for the keys. It included not only visualizations but full engineering plans. I liked both the process and the result. I was planning to bring in the Kvadrim team for implementation — they seemed reliable and kept their word.
Studio 3.14 had been around since spring 2015. Timur was the main founder. His older brother Albert Yanov and Dmitry Bezverkhiy were co-owners. But how did a political science graduate from Moscow State University end up in apartment design?
Here’s how he told it:
“My education gave me a systems view, an understanding of management. Then I worked as a history and social studies teacher. Meanwhile, interior design started as a hobby — triggered by a real-life task for our family. We’d bought an apartment for our mom in New Moscow and wanted to turn those concrete walls into something livable and beautiful. That’s when we ran into all the usual issues — unclear pricing, hard-to-find contractors, and enormous headaches during execution.”
Then came the revelation: the real margins weren’t in the design work — they were in the renovation contracts. That’s what led him to co-found Kvadrim.
But the startup had an awkward structure: four founders, three with equal stakes. That led to motivation issues, fuzzy responsibilities, and constant disagreements.
In April 2017, Timur split from his partners:
“I realized I couldn’t achieve my goal in that setup — to make designer interiors truly accessible. So I decided to launch my own firm, where I’d be fully accountable for the final result and the product, in every aspect — not just business development.”
He’d seen the high-profile market entry of a company called Sdelano (“Done”) — an innovative renovation service that had captured the attention of hip Muscovites and actively attracted investor money.
Sdelano was launched in 2014 by Afisha magazine founder Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper (then 47) and Lofting architecture partner Ilya Shargaev. Some sources also list MARHI lecturer Marko Mikhich-Eftich as a co-founder.
Initially, the company grew on a few hundred thousand dollars invested by the founders. Until 2016, it offered just two interior styles: Stockholm and Paris. As the names suggest, one was Scandinavian minimalism — made popular in Russia by Ikea (which opened its first store in Khimki in 2000) — and the other was a more elegant style, which we naturally associate with France.
But the money ran out.
According to Forbes, in November 2016 the Sdelano team raised another 20 million rubles from angel investors Alexey Menn and Boris Zhilin — about $300K at the time.
Menn later told vc.ru in 2020:
“We met the team early on, in 2016, when they were puffing up their cheeks and claiming a $10 million valuation. I passed and told them they were asking too much. Six months later, they hit their first cash crunch and told me to name my price. So I brought in a few co-investors. We ended up putting in around 30 million rubles. Each year, revenue doubled, and margins slowly improved — but the company hit major cash gaps every six months. I believed in Sdelano and helped bring in new investors — at one point they had over 30 angels on board.”
In the first half of 2017, Sdelano raised another 50 million rubles from investment holding Avenir (Boris Zhilin, Olga Masyutina) and VC fund Cabra.vc (Alexey Aleksanov, Shukhrat Ibragimov, Vladimir Cherepov).
Timur felt the momentum in the sector — and decided to step onto thin ice.
Why thin ice? Because investors pull your attention away from what matters most — building your company.
Searching, pitching, meetings, rejections — all of that drains a founder’s energy.
Finding an investor means dozens of quick pitches and endless long conversations. More like hundreds. And if you finally land one, they still need time: you’ve got to be polite, report regularly, answer questions — all while time ticks away from refining your product, working with clients, leading your team.
Can you build something big without capital?
Consider James Dyson — yes, the vacuum guy.
In 2023, Dyson reported £7.1 billion in revenue. The company has never taken a dime from outside investors. Dyson, now 77, still owns 100% of it.
Remember, companies like Chess.com, MailChimp, Zoho, ButcherBox, and Midjourney also grew without venture funding.
If you’ve got a shot at growing solo — take it. Raise money later, when you’ve proven your model. Then investors will offer more for less — and they’ll be the ones doing the convincing, not you.
But our entrepreneur decided to do the opposite.
The full book in Russian в форматах PDF, EPUB, FB2, MOBI and in paper:
⚡ Моя новая книга. «ФИАСКО. Как я вложил в стартап миллионы и потерял их»